Punk Festival to Rock Staten Island

The annual Punk Island music festival returns to Staten Island on June 21, 2015, bringing bands like RVIVR, The Crack Rock Steady 7, Rum Rebellion and more to the borough. View Full Caption

Saidy Lopez

ST. GEORGE — Punk bands will come out from the underground and take over a Staten Island pier this weekend.

Punk Island 2015, hosted by Make Music New York, returns on Sunday, bringing more than 100 punk bands to seven different stages at the Coast Guard plaza and pier in St. George.

"It's like going to seven different shows all at once," said Joey Steel, one of the organizers of the event.

"You can just walk around all day and see a whole section of different genres you didn't know existed before."

This year's festival will be headlined by The Crack Rock Steady 7 featuring Scott Stugreon — singer of Leftover Crack, Choking Victim and Star F--king Hipsters — playing songs from each of his bands, Steel said.

The free festival also features RVIVR from Washington, Rum Rebellion from Oregon, Disaster Strike from Boston, and Slow Children from California, Steel said.

Bands from all over the country, and even one from the Philippines, will play the show. But Steel said the bill also has plenty of local bands from across the city, like Nerves End from Staten Island and Penguin from Brooklyn.

Make Music New York started the festival in 2008 at Governor's Island because punk bands from around the city said they didn't have many places to play.

"A lot of punk bands said to us they love to play but there aren’t as many punk venues in the city anymore," said Aaron Friedman, president of Make Music New York.

"We arranged to use Governors Island and have all of the punk bands there. Nobody lives on Governors Island and they can play as loud as they want."

The mayor's office reached out to let the festival know about the Coast Guard pier on Staten Island as a space to play and, since they wanted to do more programming in the borough and a lot of punk bands live there, the group moved the festival three years ago.

Friedman said the event helps connect different types of bands and fans together for one day and has helped spawn similar events in Boston and Philadelphia.

"Some of them have careers as touring groups, some of them may have played in somebody’s basement, in local bars and really are pretty unknown," he said.

"It's an opportunity for all these different kinds of groups to play together."

"We should have more punk festival that are for free and all ages. It should be punk city, it should be punked out all day every day."

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